So these changes haven’t officially rolled out to every Company Page yet, but whenever Facebook makes any change, you can bet there’s going to be lots of attention.  One thing Facebook does well is test, innovate, and continue to change along with the market.  Partly due to this, even though it’s only been publicly traded for under a year, its stock value has more than tripled – rising from 22.90 in June 2013 to around 71.0 here in March (don’t take this as a stock tip to buy though!).

If you don’t already know, its ultimate goal is to be more dominant on the web than Google, and even take away as much search traffic as possible.  But, these changes don’t have much to do with search.

So What’s Going On?

Nothing too dramatic, actually, but a few noticeable things:

1. Company pages now display all posts in a single right hand column.  You know how the posts are split between two columns, and it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s the latest thing going on with a company from their Facebook page?  Facebook has made company pages easier to view by condensing all posts to a single column on the right side of the screen.  Much easier for users to view!
2. New competitive report – “Pages to Watch.”  Simply go to the “Overview” tab as an administrator, under the “Page Insights” tab on Facebook.  You can add other company pages you want to watch, so you can see how their likes and engagement have been changing in the past week. The information is fairly high-level, but it does alert you to what your competitors are doing that works, and what doesn’t.
3. Custom tabs have gone away from the front of the page. Those tabs just below your cover image are now gone.  No one’s sure where they moved to yet.  Some digital marketers are getting annoyed with this, but you can easily work around it by offering relevant calls-to-action every so often.

So, like we said, they’re not dramatic changes, but they are noticeable.  Comments on websites like Mashable, one of the first sites to break the story, have been mostly negative, but some reaction like this is to be expected.

Will this significantly hamper your digital marketing efforts? Probably not.  And as always, everyone will learn to adapt and innovate.